Re-reading British historian of technology David's Edgerton's "SHOCK OF THE OLD" recently, I found it a fount of zillions of ideas, stimulating my mind into overdrive, and forcing me to look at our world anew.
Perhaps in light of my recent studies on the continuing impact of (mutated) Romanticism upon everything, I can better appreciate the force of Edgerton's main argument that histories of technology and science focus far, far, far too exclusively on 'priority' and 'original originality' ----- entrepreneurs,inventors and scientists all being obsessed with being original ,creative and 'the first'.
Historians of science - unabashed fans and cheerleaders for the most part, have uncritically taken these techie-guys at their word and not probed any deeper or harder.
THE SHOCK OF THE NEW does just that: showing by focusing on the use ,not the invention, of technology's products , Edgerton's aptly named 'things', we get an entirely re-written history of the world.
Use means adaptation and improvising and altering - all highly original but not the original original and thus ignored in the ongoing Mutated-Romantic Era.
But earlier (Classically-oriented) ages were far more inclined to honor craftsman for improving ancient skill sets -- we should do the same today, in this new Pre-Scarcity Era, preparing for times ahead that will put a premium on frugality and inventive re-use, and the creolization of things...
SVE is proud to add Edgerton to its must-read author listings....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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